Wiki Generics

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

Wiki Generics
Status of the proposal
Status	under discussion
Details of the proposal
Project description	Wiki Generics is a proposed multilingual Wikimedia sister project dedicated to creating, organizing, and maintaining free, neutral, verifiable knowledge about generic medicines, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), formulations, dosage forms, therapeutic classifications, pharmacological properties, medicine terminology, and relationships between generic medicines and branded products. The project would provide a structured reference layer between broad encyclopedic information and machine-readable data. It would allow contributors to document individual active ingredients and generic medicines using standardized fields, authoritative references, multilingual terminology, classifications, identifiers, chemical information, dosage forms, routes of administration, known uses, contraindication information, regulatory status where reliably sourced, and relationships to related medicines. Wiki Generics would not provide personalized diagnosis, prescribing, treatment recommendations, or medical consultations. Its purpose would be to make reliable, freely licensed medicine information easier to discover, compare, translate, cite, reuse, and maintain. The project could particularly benefit students, pharmacists, physicians, nurses, researchers, educators, journalists, developers, translators, librarians, and the general public seeking freely accessible reference information. As a Wikimedia project, Wiki Generics could combine community editorial review, multilingual collaboration, Wikidata integration, Wikimedia Commons media, Wikipedia links, Wikisource references, and Wikimedia's infrastructure for free knowledge. It could also provide structured data that can be reused by educational resources, open-source software, research projects, accessibility tools, and other Wikimedia projects.
Is it a multilingual wiki?	One multilingual wiki, with language-aware content and terminology; structured data should support multilingual names, synonyms, and descriptions.
Potential number of languages	Many languages
Proposed tagline	Free knowledge about medicines, active ingredients, and generic drugs
Proposed URL	wiki-generics.org
Technical requirements
New features to require	The project should be implementable primarily with existing MediaWiki, Wikibase/Wikidata, templates, Lua, citations, categories, and structured-data infrastructure. Additional development may be useful for standardized medicine infoboxes, controlled vocabularies, API access, validation of structured fields, duplicate/redirect management, multilingual terminology, and integration with Wikidata. Any automated imports must be subject to community review, provenance tracking, licensing review, and quality controls.
Development wiki	A technical-development environment could be established if the proposal advances toward incubation.
Additional project settings	Wiki Generics should permit freely licensed text, structured data, diagrams, chemical structures, educational illustrations, and other compatible media. External databases may be used as references or sources only when their licensing permits reuse; copyrighted proprietary medicine databases should not simply be copied into the project. The project should establish strong policies for medical-content sourcing, editorial review, conflict-of-interest disclosure, provenance, citation requirements, outdated information, regulatory claims, automated editing, and handling of potentially dangerous or misleading medical information. Wiki Generics should explicitly distinguish reference information from medical advice. It should not diagnose users, recommend individualized treatment, determine an individual's dosage, or replace professional medical advice. The project should encourage links to authoritative primary and secondary sources, including regulatory authorities, pharmacopoeias, peer-reviewed literature, systematic reviews, and other appropriately licensed or citable sources. A major objective would be interoperability with Wikidata, allowing entities such as active ingredients, chemical compounds, dosage forms, therapeutic classes, manufacturers, identifiers, and medicine relationships to be connected without duplicating Wikidata's role as the general-purpose structured-data repository.

Proposal

Overview

Wiki Generics is a proposed Wikimedia sister project for free knowledge about generic medicines and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

The central idea is to create a dedicated, openly editable knowledge resource in which medicine information can be organized consistently across languages and linked to the wider Wikimedia ecosystem.

Wikipedia can explain a medicine encyclopedically. Wikidata can represent individual facts and relationships in a general-purpose knowledge graph. Wikisource can preserve source documents. Wiki Generics would instead focus on the specialized organization, explanation, comparison, and maintenance of medicine and generic-drug knowledge.

The project would therefore complement existing Wikimedia projects rather than simply duplicate them.

Why is Wiki Generics needed?

Medicine information is widely distributed across pharmaceutical references, regulatory databases, scientific publications, national formularies, hospital resources, educational materials, and commercial websites.

This creates several problems:

• Medicine information is often fragmented across different websites.
• Generic names, brand names, chemical names, abbreviations, and multilingual names can be difficult to connect.
• The same active ingredient can appear in many formulations, strengths, combinations, and brand products.
• Information is often presented differently between countries and languages.
• Commercial medicine databases may restrict reuse, automated access, or redistribution.
• Educational medicine resources are frequently separated from open knowledge infrastructure.
• Search engines often return commercially motivated medicine information before freely accessible reference information.
• Developers and researchers lack a single Wikimedia-oriented knowledge layer specifically designed around medicines and generic drugs.
• Many people need basic medicine reference information but cannot access expensive proprietary databases.
• Students and educators benefit from structured explanations that connect pharmaceutical terminology with broader scientific knowledge.

Wiki Generics would address this gap by creating a free, multilingual, community-maintained reference resource centered on generic medicines and active ingredients.

Core scope

Wiki Generics could contain pages and structured records for:

Active pharmaceutical ingredients

• International nonproprietary names (INNs)
• Generic names
• Chemical names
• Synonyms
• Chemical identifiers
• Molecular formulae and molecular masses
• Pharmacological classifications
• Therapeutic classifications
• Mechanisms of action
• Pharmacokinetic information
• Pharmacodynamic information
• Routes of administration
• Common dosage forms
• Stability and storage information where reliably sourced
• Major interactions where appropriately sourced
• Safety information from authoritative references
• Links to scientific literature

Generic medicines

• Generic medicine names
• Active ingredients
• Strengths
• Dosage forms
• Routes of administration
• Combination products
• Therapeutic classes
• Pharmaceutical classifications
• Links to relevant active-ingredient pages
• Country-specific regulatory information where appropriate
• References and provenance
• Relationships to branded products where reliably documented

Dosage forms

Examples could include:

• Tablets
• Capsules
• Solutions
• Suspensions
• Syrups
• Creams
• Ointments
• Gels
• Injections
• Inhalers
• Patches
• Suppositories
• Drops
• Powders
• Other standardized pharmaceutical dosage forms

Medicine classifications

Wiki Generics could organize medicines through standardized classifications such as:

• Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classifications
• Pharmacological classes
• Therapeutic classes
• Chemical classifications
• Routes of administration
• Dosage forms
• Other appropriately sourced classification systems

Where classifications are copyrighted or subject to restrictions, Wiki Generics would only use them in ways permitted by their licensing and applicable law.

What Wiki Generics would NOT be

Wiki Generics would not be:

• A replacement for a physician or pharmacist.
• A platform for personalized medical diagnosis.
• A prescribing service.
• A place to determine an individual's dosage.
• A medical emergency service.
• A pharmaceutical advertising platform.
• A repository for promotional claims by manufacturers.
• A place for unsourced medical claims.
• A commercial medicine marketplace.

The project would provide reference knowledge, not individualized medical advice.

Relationship with Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides encyclopedic articles about medicines, diseases, pharmacology, and related subjects.

Wiki Generics would have a narrower and more structured scope.

For example, a Wikipedia article might explain the history, discovery, pharmacology, and social significance of a medicine.

A Wiki Generics page could instead provide a standardized reference structure covering:

• generic name;
• active ingredient;
• chemical identifiers;
• dosage forms;
• routes of administration;
• therapeutic classification;
• pharmacological classification;
• standardized terminology;
• related medicines;
• regulatory information;
• references;
• multilingual names;
• structured relationships.

Wiki Generics would link extensively to Wikipedia rather than competing with it.

Relationship with Wikidata

Wikidata would remain Wikimedia's general-purpose structured knowledge graph.

Wiki Generics would specialize the human-readable and domain-specific editorial layer for medicines while using Wikidata wherever appropriate.

Potential integrations include:

• Wikidata entity identifiers;
• multilingual labels;
• active ingredients;
• chemical compounds;
• pharmaceutical forms;
• manufacturers;
• regulatory identifiers;
• therapeutic classifications;
• external identifiers;
• links between related Wikimedia projects.

Wiki Generics should avoid unnecessarily duplicating data that belongs in Wikidata.

Relationship with Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons could provide compatible media such as:

• chemical structure diagrams;
• molecular models;
• educational illustrations;
• diagrams of dosage forms;
• pharmaceutical manufacturing diagrams;
• historical public-domain medicine images;
• freely licensed educational photographs.

Wiki Generics would link to and reuse compatible Commons material.

Relationship with Wikisource

Wikisource could preserve historical or freely licensed primary documents relevant to pharmaceutical and medical history.

Wiki Generics could cite appropriate Wikisource documents where they are reliable and relevant.

Relationship with Wikiversity and Wikibooks

Wiki Generics could provide factual reference material while Wikiversity and Wikibooks could provide educational courses, textbooks, and learning resources.

For example:

Wiki Generics: What is amoxicillin? What are its classifications, forms, identifiers, and documented properties?

Wikibooks/Wikiversity: How should students learn pharmacology and antimicrobial pharmacology?

This would allow the projects to complement each other.

Major benefits

Free access to medicine knowledge

A major objective would be to provide medicine reference information without requiring users to purchase access to proprietary databases.

Global multilingual access

Medicine terminology varies substantially between languages and regions.

A multilingual Wikimedia project could allow volunteers to translate and maintain terminology while connecting equivalent concepts.

Structured medicine knowledge

The project could use standardized fields so that medicine information is consistently represented.

This could improve:

• search;
• accessibility;
• translation;
• education;
• citation;
• data reuse;
• interoperability;
• machine-readable knowledge.

Educational value

Wiki Generics could become a useful open reference for:

• medical students;
• pharmacy students;
• nursing students;
• laboratory students;
• researchers;
• educators;
• health-information professionals.

It could provide a common free knowledge layer without replacing formal education or professional references.

Research and scientific reuse

Researchers could use appropriately licensed Wiki Generics data to build:

• educational applications;
• open-source reference tools;
• multilingual terminology systems;
• scientific visualizations;
• accessibility tools;
• knowledge graphs;
• academic projects.

Accessibility

A Wikimedia-hosted resource could potentially make medicine terminology easier to access through:

• screen readers;
• multilingual interfaces;
• simplified explanations;
• structured navigation;
• machine-readable data;
• offline Wikimedia distribution.

Global South and underserved communities

Free knowledge can be particularly valuable where expensive commercial pharmaceutical databases are difficult to access.

Wiki Generics could support volunteers creating high-quality medicine reference information in languages that are poorly represented in commercial resources.

Editorial and medical-content safeguards

Because medicine is a high-risk information domain, Wiki Generics should adopt unusually strong editorial standards.

Possible requirements include:

Claims about medicines should be supported by reliable references.

Important medical claims should have clear citations.

Sources should be identified with publication or update dates where possible.

Regulatory information should identify the relevant jurisdiction.

Outdated information should be flagged and reviewed.

Contributors should not present personal medical opinions as established facts.

Manufacturer promotional material should not be treated as neutral evidence.

Conflicts of interest should be disclosed where relevant.

Automated imports should retain source provenance.

Bot-generated content should undergo appropriate community review.

The project should clearly distinguish established evidence from uncertainty or disagreement.

Individualized medical advice should be outside the project's scope.

Content should not encourage unsafe self-medication.

The project could also establish a dedicated Medicine Content Notice explaining that its pages are educational references and should not substitute for professional medical advice.

Neutrality

Wiki Generics should be explicitly non-commercial and manufacturer-neutral.

Brand names could be documented when they are encyclopedically or structurally relevant, but the project should not rank products as "best", promote manufacturers, publish advertising, or encourage purchases.

Where several manufacturers produce the same generic medicine, the project should focus on the underlying medicine and verifiable information rather than marketing claims.

Country-specific information

Medicine availability, approval, formulations, strengths, brand names, and regulatory status can differ between countries.

Wiki Generics should therefore distinguish:

• globally applicable scientific information;
• country-specific regulatory information;
• country-specific brand information;
• historical information;
• information whose validity depends on jurisdiction.

Country-specific claims should identify their jurisdiction and source.

Proposed page structure

A standardized medicine page could include sections such as:

• Summary
• Generic name
• Active ingredient(s)
• Chemical information
• Pharmacological classification
• Therapeutic classification
• Mechanism of action
• Dosage forms
• Routes of administration
• Pharmacokinetics
• Pharmacodynamics
• Indications and documented uses
• Contraindications and warnings
• Interactions
• Adverse effects
• Regulatory information
• Names and synonyms
• Related medicines
• Related active ingredients
• External identifiers
• References
• Wikimedia projects
• Wikidata

Not every field would necessarily be required for every page.

Machine-readable knowledge

One of Wiki Generics' strongest potential features would be the combination of human-readable articles with structured information.

A medicine could have structured relationships such as:

Medicine → contains active ingredient → active ingredient

Active ingredient → belongs to → pharmacological class

Active ingredient → has dosage form → tablet

Medicine → has route → oral

Active ingredient → has identifier → external identifier

Medicine → has regulatory status → jurisdiction-specific status

Such relationships could be connected to Wikidata where appropriate.

This would make the project useful not only to readers but also to researchers and software developers.

Data provenance

Every imported or structured data element should have clear provenance.

The project should record, where technically practical:

• source;
• date of retrieval;
• contributor or bot;
• license;
• jurisdiction;
• revision history;
• confidence or review status where appropriate.

This would be particularly important for regulatory and scientific information.

Open licensing

The project should follow Wikimedia's free-knowledge licensing requirements.

Content and data should only be imported where the applicable license permits Wikimedia reuse.

The project should not become a repository for proprietary pharmaceutical databases copied without permission.

Automation and bots

Bots could potentially assist with:

• detecting duplicate medicine pages;
• identifying missing references;
• checking standardized fields;
• updating permitted public-domain/openly licensed datasets;
• finding broken identifiers;
• detecting inconsistent terminology;
• generating maintenance reports.

However, automation should not replace human editorial responsibility.

Medical-content automation should have particularly strong safeguards.

Potential technical architecture

The project could initially use existing Wikimedia infrastructure rather than requiring a completely new platform.

Potential components include:

• MediaWiki;
• Wikibase;
• Wikidata integration;
• templates;
• Lua modules;
• structured data;
• categories;
• multilingual tools;
• citation infrastructure;
• Wikimedia Commons;
• APIs;
• bot frameworks.

Possible future extensions could provide standardized medicine infoboxes, controlled vocabularies, validation, structured comparisons, and medicine-specific search.

The project should begin with the minimum technical infrastructure necessary and expand only when demonstrated community needs justify additional development.

Potential users

Wiki Generics could serve:

• patients seeking general reference information;
• pharmacists;
• physicians;
• nurses;
• medical students;
• pharmacy students;
• researchers;
• educators;
• journalists;
• translators;
• librarians;
• software developers;
• accessibility developers;
• open-data researchers;
• Wikimedia contributors.

The project would not attempt to replace professional clinical resources.

Examples of possible pages

Potential pages could include:

• Paracetamol
• Ibuprofen
• Amoxicillin
• Metformin
• Omeprazole
• Salbutamol
• A particular dosage form
• A pharmacological class
• A therapeutic class
• A pharmaceutical terminology concept

These examples are illustrative; inclusion would depend on reliable sourcing and community policies.

Potential impact

Wiki Generics could become a public knowledge infrastructure layer connecting:

Scientific literature

↓

Medicine and pharmaceutical knowledge

↓

Wiki Generics

↓

Wikidata + Wikipedia + Wikimedia Commons + Wikisource + Wikibooks + Wikiversity

↓

Researchers, educators, developers and the public

This structure could make pharmaceutical knowledge more discoverable, reusable, multilingual, and interoperable.

Challenges and risks

The proposal recognizes significant challenges.

Medical misinformation

Medicine is a high-risk information field. Strong sourcing and editorial standards would therefore be essential.

Rapidly changing information

Regulatory information, formulations, safety warnings, and scientific knowledge can change.

The project would need mechanisms for identifying and reviewing outdated information.

Country differences

A medicine may be approved, unavailable, differently formulated, or differently regulated in different jurisdictions.

Wiki Generics should explicitly represent these differences rather than presenting country-specific claims as universally applicable.

Copyright and licensing

Commercial drug databases cannot simply be copied.

The project must prioritize original community-written content, compatible open data, public-domain sources, and properly licensed information.

Community sustainability

A successful Wikimedia project requires an active contributor community.

The project should therefore begin with a pilot/incubation phase and establish measurable community goals before becoming a full sister project.

Pilot proposal

Before requesting full establishment, Wiki Generics could be tested through a Wikimedia incubation environment or another community-supported pilot.

A pilot could evaluate:

• number of active contributors;
• number of high-quality medicine pages;
• number of languages;
• citation quality;
• community review;
• Wikidata integration;
• maintenance workload;
• bot feasibility;
• reader demand;
• technical requirements.

The pilot could establish a practical evidence base for determining whether Wiki Generics deserves independent Wikimedia project status.

Success criteria

Potential success indicators include:

• A sustainable contributor community.
• High-quality, consistently cited medicine pages.
• Multiple participating languages.
• Strong integration with Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects.
• Demonstrated educational use.
• Reusable open data.
• Effective maintenance of outdated information.
• Low levels of unsourced or promotional content.
• Clear community policies for medical information.
• Demonstrated reader demand.

Why Wikimedia?

Wikimedia is uniquely suited to this proposal because Wiki Generics would require:

• free knowledge principles;
• multilingual collaboration;
• community editorial processes;
• transparent revision histories;
• open licensing;
• interoperability with existing knowledge projects;
• global volunteer participation;
• long-term public access.

A commercial platform could provide medicine information, but its incentives and licensing model would differ fundamentally from Wikimedia's mission.

Wiki Generics would be intended as public knowledge infrastructure rather than a commercial pharmaceutical database.

Potential objections

Could this simply be Wikipedia?

Some content could certainly belong on Wikipedia. However, the proposal focuses on a specialized structured reference system rather than general encyclopedic articles.

The project would need to demonstrate that this specialized scope produces meaningful advantages that cannot reasonably be achieved through Wikipedia alone.

Could this simply be Wikidata?

Wikidata is a general-purpose structured knowledge base.

Wiki Generics would provide a domain-specific editorial and reference environment in which contributors could explain, organize, cite, translate, and maintain pharmaceutical information.

The two projects could be complementary.

Could this simply be a Wikidata WikiProject?

This should be investigated during the proposal process.

If the required functionality can be achieved satisfactorily through Wikidata and existing Wikimedia projects, the community should consider that option.

If the pilot demonstrates a distinct and sustainable need for a dedicated project, the evidence would strengthen the case for Wiki Generics as a sister project.

Long-term vision

The long-term vision is to create a freely accessible global reference for generic medicines and pharmaceutical knowledge that is:

• free
• multilingual
• neutral
• verifiable
• structured
• interoperable
• educational
• non-commercial
• community maintained

Wiki Generics would aim to make reliable pharmaceutical knowledge available as a public good while connecting it to the broader Wikimedia ecosystem.

Proposed by

Muhammad Umar Jabbar

Alternative names

• WikiGenerics
• Wiki Generics
• Wikimedicines
• WikiPharma
• WikiMedicines
• Wikidrugs

Wiki Generics is currently preferred because it clearly communicates the proposed project's focus on generic medicines while retaining the familiar Wikimedia "Wiki" naming convention.

Related projects/proposals

• Wikipedia
• Wikidata
• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikisource
• Wikibooks
• Wikiversity
• Wiktionary
• Existing Wikimedia proposals concerning scientific, chemical, pharmaceutical, or structured-data knowledge.

The proposal should be compared carefully with any existing or future proposals covering medicine, chemistry, pharmacology, pharmaceutical data, or scientific databases.

Domain names

• wiki-generics.org
• wikigenerics.org
• wikigenerics.wikimedia.org

These are proposed names only and would require appropriate domain and trademark review.

Mailing list links

Discussion should take place through the appropriate Wikimedia community venues and proposal discussion pages.

Demos

A pilot/demo should ideally be created before requesting full establishment.

Possible pilot environments include Wikimedia-supported incubation mechanisms or another openly licensed MediaWiki installation.

The pilot should demonstrate:

• medicine pages;
• structured medicine data;
• multilingual terminology;
• citations;
• Wikidata connections;
• search;
• categorization;
• editorial review;
• provenance.

People interested

• Muhammad Umar Jabbar

Additional participants, especially Wikimedia contributors, pharmacists, physicians, nurses, pharmacologists, researchers, developers, data specialists, translators, and medical-information editors, are invited to participate.

Open questions for community discussion

Is Wiki Generics sufficiently distinct from Wikipedia and Wikidata to justify a dedicated Wikimedia project?

Should the project focus exclusively on generic medicines, or also cover active pharmaceutical ingredients and related pharmaceutical concepts?

Should the initial project be one multilingual wiki?

What medical-content policies would be necessary?

Which data sources can legally and technically be used?

What information should be represented in Wikidata versus Wiki Generics?

What minimum contributor community should be demonstrated during incubation?

What technical features are actually necessary?

Which organizations or Wikimedia affiliates could help evaluate the proposal?

What should the pilot's measurable success criteria be?

Conclusion

Wiki Generics proposes a focused Wikimedia environment for free, multilingual, structured, verifiable knowledge about generic medicines and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Its success should not be assumed simply because medicine information is important. The central question is whether a dedicated project would provide capabilities and community value that existing Wikimedia projects cannot adequately provide.

For that reason, the proposal supports a transparent community discussion and, if appropriate, a pilot phase capable of producing evidence about community demand, technical feasibility, editorial quality, sustainability, and the project's distinct value within the Wikimedia ecosystem.